Pasadia Eco-Educativo el 7 de enero

Dos minutos de pasion: Edgardo Alvarado

La SPP celebra el nombramiento de Carmen Guerrero

MENSAJE DEL PRESIDENTE DE LA SPP Y SU JUNTA DE DIRECTORES EN RELACIÓN AL NOMBRAMIENTO DE LA 

PLANIFICADORA CARMEN GUERRERO PÉREZ, COMO SECRETARIA DEL DRNA

La Presidencia y Junta de Directores de la Sociedad Puertorriqueña de Planificación (SPP) desea comunicar a todos sus socios y allegados, y a todo el país, su beneplácito y alegría por la designación de la planificadora Carmen R. Guerrero Pérez como Secretaria del Departamento de Recursos Naturales y Ambientales.

La compañera planificadora, socia activa de la SPP, se ha distinguido, desde sus años de estudiante y durante toda su vida profesional, como una seria y dedicada propulsora del desarrollo sostenible del país y defensora de las causas comunitarias y ambientales. Su capacidad profesional ha quedado evidenciada por los reconocimientos recibidos por diversas entidades y sobre todo por el respeto que se ha ganado de todos los sectores, inclusive depersonas y entidades con agendas muy diversas.

Por este medio deseamos felicitar tanto a la planificadora Guerrero, por su designación, como al Gobernador Electo, Honorable Alejandro García Padilla, quien con esta designación muestra valentía y sabiduría, evidenciando además su compromiso con un cambio de rumbo en la forma como nuestra sociedad visualiza su desarrollo futuro.

Contamos, tanto la SPP como todo el País, no sólo con la capacidad y dedicación de la colega ante los enormes retos que enfrentará, sino con el continuado apoyo de sus gestiones por parte del nuevo Gobernador y de otros miembros del Gabinete. Este apoyo resultará crítico en las muchas e inevitables situaciones en que la definición de nuevos rumbos hacia un desarrollo sostenible, genere temores y oposición de parte de los que crean que así defienden sus intereses particulares.

La planificadora Guerrero cuenta con nuestro apoyo y estamos a su disposición para colaborar en su agenda de trabajo, al servicio del desarrollo sostenible de Puerto Rico.

Gabriel Andrés Rodríguez Fernández, PPL

Presidente de la Junta de Directores

Sociedad Puertorriqueña de Planificación

Erika Fontanez escribe sobre nombramiento de Carmen Guerrero

PARA LEER EL RESTO:
http://poderyambiente.blogspot.com/2012/12/carmen-guerrero-para-un-deber-ser.html

Carmen Guerrero, para un "deber ser" gubernamental 

Erika Fontanez

A partir de enero de 2013 el Departamento de Recursos Naturales y Ambientales contará con una nueva Secretaria: Carmen Guerrero Pérez. No hay forma de hacer un buen análisis si no se mira atrás unas cuantas décadas y se examina la trayectoria tanto de Carmen como del contexto de controversias y movimientos sociales en el eje medioambiental en Puerto Rico. El asunto puramente partidista me interesa menos, los grupos de interés que han dictado la agenda mucho más. Digamos esto por ahora: Además del mérito y la respectiva preparación y experiencia, ocupar una secretaría de gabinete implica, entre otras cosas, implantar y fomentar la política pública de la agencia y velar por que su Ley Orgánica se cumpla, ser la voz de esa política pública en la Rama Ejecutiva y ante el Gobernador, reconocer a los sectores y grupos de interés y saber aglutinar fuerzas y energías en la agencia para que funcione.

Presentación de Myrna Comas a la Cámara de Comercio de Puerto Rico

http://www.camarapr.org/Presentaciones-Calaf/Agricultura-Myrna-Comas-Pagan.pdf

Favor de archivar bajo "Inseguridad alimentaria"

JWT's top ten trends for 2013

Valuable information. This is of interest whether you are involved in business or in politics.



http://www.jwt.com/blog/consumer_insights/jwts-10-trends-shaping-consumer-mindset-and-behavior-in-2013/

JWT’s 10 trends shaping consumer mindset and behavior in 2013

December 3, 2012 • by JWT

Each year the team over at JWT Intelligenceshares their forecast of trends set to drive consumer behavior in the coming year and beyond. The eighth annual “10 Trends Report” reflects evolutions in technology and its growing impact on our everyday lives. 

JWT Director of Trendspotting, Ann Mack, explains, “New technology continues to take center stage, as we see major shifts tied to warp-speed developments in mobile, social and data technologies.” The forecast also puts a spotlight on health, with two separate trends examining the rising awareness around the impact of stress and happiness on well-being and how businesses are addressing it. The report moves beyond to trends to examine how businesses are engaging and reacting to these consumer shifts.

JWT’s “10 Trends for 2013” is the result of quantitative, qualitative and desk research conducted throughout the year. It includes input from JWT planners across more than two dozen markets and interviews with experts and influencers across sectors including technology, health and wellness, retail, media and academia.

Watch the video below and find out what’s in store for 2013:

What advertisers are thinking

This is from the JWT advertising agency's site:

http://www.jwt.com/blog/consumer_insights/whats-big-100-things-to-watch-in-2013/

What’s Big? 100 Things to Watch in 2013

December 26, 2012 • by JWT

A new year calls for new trends and new challenges for brands, marketers and consumers alike. Complementing their recently released 10 Trends for 2013, JWT Intelligence’s 100 Things to Watch is a substantial list predicting what will be big in the year ahead.

Based on research across sectors such as travel, technology, food, retail and sustainability, the list reflects the major developments bubbling up. This year, technology takes the spotlight once more with “appcessories,” digital ecosystems, flexible screens, and responsive Web design topping the list.

Other top things to watch include new foods and ingredients like faux meat and chia seeds. Keep an eye out for quiet products, shopping hotels, mindful living, privacy etiquette, and adult playgrounds, which are just a sample of items also included.

There’s no doubt, 100 Things to Watch in 2013 will put a bounty of interesting things on your radar. So check out the JWT Intelligence Slideshare below, which includes the full list and details on what makes each item worth watching.

A Closer Look At The Evolution Of Brazil’s Overseas Investments

From the World Resources Institute web site:

http://insights.wri.org/news/2012/12/closer-look-evolution-brazils-overseas-investments

From 2001 to 2011, Brazil's per capita GDP more than tripled. Photo credit: Flickr/Rodrigo Soldon

Excerpt:

Brazil’s Economic Boom

The development finance landscape is changing rapidly. While this type of finance has historically flowed from developed to developing nations, over the last decade, major emerging economies such as China and Brazil have fueled a growing trend of South-South development flows, increasingly channeling their overseas investments to other developing nations. For example, BNDES dominates investment flows in Andean and Southern Cone countries. It’s also making significant strategic investments in other Latin American and sub-Saharan African nations.

WRI’s Emerging Actors Work

WRI’s research on Brazil’s outward foreign direct investment (OFDI) flows is part of our Emerging Actors in Development Finance work stream under the International Financial Flows and the Environment objective. WRI’s Emerging Actors team also engages in similar work in China.

As we note in the slide deck, BNDES has extended its international development finance role through a variety of initiatives. A few include: the—creation of an investment arm; an export-import branch; a subsidiary in London that helps with internationalization of Brazilian companies; and management of new financial instruments such as theAmazon Fund and Brazil’s Climate Fund.

These Investments Have Social and Environmental Implications

While spurring economic growth, BNDES faces multiple challenges in ensuring that its investments are environmentally sound and socially just. For example, BNDES makes significant investments in Latin American and sub-Saharan African nations, some of which may have weak governance systems to control the impacts of investments from overseas.

Adequately addressing these challenges requires a set of guidelines to ensure that investments are made in a socially just and environmentally beneficial manner. BNDES is increasingly interested in being recognized as a responsible global investor, already putting in place initiatives like its socio-environmental policies. But it’s important that BNDES—and Brazil as a country—achieve greater commitments and safeguards.

Please support the Center for Diversity and the Environment

CDE executive director Marcelo Bonta is a good friend and colleague of mine whom I first met through the Environmental Leadership Program back in 2003. This is an organization worth supporting!


http://myemail.constantcontact.com/Is-Change-Happening-.html?soid=1102417215459&aid=DNYSDuKLm2I

Greetings! Last night at CDE's Annual Holiday Party, I met with many incredible people who are including equity, diversity, and inclusion in their efforts- people leading organizational change processes, others creating a park and jobs in a community of color, and others including diversity and equity in food policy, wildlife conservation, pollution, education, health issues, and watershed protection. The experience was humbling and amazing- humbling because of the amount of people CDE has touched over the years and the influence we have had in their work. The experience was amazing because all of these individuals and the actions they are implementing, whether big or small, are adding to momentum that cannot be stopped. Change is happening. For many of these agents of change, our touch point has been through our transformational leadership development programs. Over 230 program alumni continue to create change, even years after their experience, and their work becomes increasingly impactful over time as they continue to grow and gain experience in diversity, equity, and inclusion work. Below is one story of our impact. Investing in CDE is investing in a diverse, equitable, and successful environmental movement, now and forever. Please give. "I sit at a table with three other women. Two of us are speaking Spanish, two are trying to say Adelante Agricultura like it's a tongue twister. Adelante Mujeres, a nonprofit working to educate and empower low-income Latina women and families, wants to build curriculum for their students that links sustainable farming practices with t Monica Smiley, Executive Director, Tualatin Riverkeepers he conservation of Gale's Creek. My organization, Tualatin Riverkeepers, wants to protect the waters of Gale's Creek for steelhead an d cutthroat trout. Our organizations can be classified differently- one human services, the other environmental. Both are integral to a healthy community. The four of us are meeting to create a program (Adelante Agricultura) together that meets our shared values.   This meeting represents a great shift in the relationship between our two organizations and also for the environmental movement. This shift is possible because of the work of the Center for Diversity & the Environment. In 2011, I participated in the Center for Diversity & the Environment's Environment 2042 Leadership Development Program, which has been one of the most important and critical professional experiences of my life.  Through this program I learned how to establish meaningful partnerships with communities of color to create a shared vision of our community.   My experience with the Center for Diversity & the Environment has changed me; it has changed how I view and approach my life and work; and it has changed my organization.   I am forever grateful for the Center for Diversity & the Environment.  They are doing crucial work that is re-defining and re-shaping the environmental movement- changing one life at a time." ~ Monica Smiley, Executive Director, Tualatin Riverkeepers

Your investment today will allow other leaders to have experiences like Monica.  Please consider a recurring donation of only $15/month. Thank you, Marcelo Bonta Founder & Executive Director Center for Diversity & the Environment www.environmentaldiversity.org

Y candados también

Me dicen el nombre "Pedro Toledo" y lo que me viene a la mente es esta imagen.

The Hobbit

How many people even remember that The Hobbit was made into an animated television film in 1977?

National Intelligence Council Global Trends 2030: Alternative Worlds

TO READ THE WHOLE THING: http://publicintelligence.net/global-trends-2030/

Global Trends 2030: Alternative Worlds

• 160 pages
• December 2012
• 20.5 MB

This report is intended to stimulate thinking about the rapid and vast geopolitical changes characterizing the world today and possible global trajectories during the next 15-20 years. As with the NIC’s previous Global Trends reports, we do not seek to predict the future—which would be an impossible feat—but instead provide a framework for thinking about possible futures and their implications.

The world of 2030 will be radically transformed from our world today. By 2030, no country—whether the US, China, or any other large country—will be a hegemonic power. The empowerment of individuals and diffusion of power among states and from states to informal networks will have a dramatic impact, largely reversing the historic rise of the West since 1750, restoring Asia’s weight in the global economy, and ushering in a new era of “democratization” at the international and domestic level. In addition to individual empowerment and the diffusion of state power, we believe that two other megatrends will shape our world out to 2030: demographic patterns, especially rapid aging; and growing resource demands which, in the cases of food and water, might lead to scarcities. These trends, which are virtually certain, exist today, but during the next 15-20 years they will gain much greater momentum. Underpinning the megatrends are tectonic shifts—critical changes to key features of our global environment that will affect how the world “works” (see table on page v).

Extrapolations of the megatrends would alone point to a changed world by 2030—but the world could be transformed in radically different ways. We believe that six key game-changers—questions regarding the global economy, governance, conflict, regional instability, technology, and the role of the United States—will largely determine what kind of transformed world we will inhabit in 2030. Several potential Black Swans—discrete events—would cause large-scale disruption (see page xi). All but two of these—the possibility of a democratic China or a reformed Iran—would have negative repercussions. Based upon what we know about the megatrends and the possible interactions between the megatrends and the game-changers, we have delineated four archetypal futures that represent distinct pathways for the world out to 2030. None of these alternative worlds is inevitable. In reality, the future probably will consist of elements from all the scenarios.

Stan Cox on vertical farming

TO READ THE WHOLE ARTICLE:
http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/12/11/the-vertical-farming-scam/

DECEMBER 11, 2012

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Wrong on So Many Levels

The Vertical Farming Scam

by STAN COX

Why, after more than a decade, does the idea of “vertical farming” keep gathering momentum? Why hasn’t it collapsed under its own weight of illogic? And why is media coverage of vertical farming almost universally positive, often enthusiastically so?

I suppose we shouldn’t be surprised when a fantasy persists and thrives despite being unrealistic; after all, that’s what fantasies do. And the vertical-farming concept, unlike, say, creationism, aims at worthy goals. But when a pipedream comes to be regarded, wholly uncritically, as a means of fixing our broken food system, it becomes a dangerous distraction.

National Intelligence Council Report: Megatrends That Matter For Business

http://insights.wri.org/news/2012/12/national-intelligence-council-report-megatrends-matter-business



by Manish Bapna
December 21 2012

This post originally appeared on Forbes.com.

Two-hundred page policy reports don’t normally sit on a CEO’s bedside table. But the U.S. National Intelligence Council’s (NIC)wide-ranging new assessment of what the world will look like in 2030 is essential reading for smart, forward-looking corporate leaders.

Most international media attention around Global Trends 2030, produced every four years, has focused on its geopolitical analysis—rising China, plateauing United States, and potential failing states. But the private sector should pay careful attention to the megatrends the report highlights. Many relate to the profound sustainability challenges facing a warming world that will housearound 8 billion people in 2030.

Ecuador: Organizaciones sociales y campesinas piden que se mantenga prohibición a los transgénicos

CLICKEA EL LINK 

Una veintena de organizaciones sociales y campesinas piden en un comunicado dirigido al Dr. César Paz y Miño que exista un debate claro y transparente en torno a los transgénicos. El grupo aclara algunos puntos, que según ellos, son clave al momento de hablar de Organismos Genéticamente Modificados (OGMs).

El comunicado indica que el modelo agrícola que se impone con los transgénicos no beneficia a los campesinos pues merma la capacidad de producción de los campos, pone en riesgo los cultivos al exponerlos a la posibilidad de sufrir contaminación genética e impide el libre intercambio de semillas entre campesinos, forzando la compra de semillas patentadas.

En la misma línea se aclara que el negocio de los medicamentos transgénicos como la insulina, no beneficia directamente a los consumidores, ya que no se reducen los costos de venta al público, sino que se reducen los costos de producción en beneficio de las empresas farmacéuticas.

Finalmente, las organizaciones que firman la carta señalan que el fortalecimiento en la agricultura en el Ecuador sería un mecanismo efectivo para consolidar un modelo de producción agroecológico que beneficie tanto a los campesinos y sus familias, como a los consumidores en las ciudades.

An Incurious ‘Zero Dark Thirty’

http://consortiumnews.com/2012/12/21/an-incurious-zero-dark-thirty/

Zero Dark Thirty, the big-screen chronicling of the manhunt for Osama bin Laden, has been hailed by some critics for its taut storytelling, but it fails to confront the larger questions about 9/11, including the complex history between the CIA and its target, writes Jim DiEugenio.

We All Failed Gary Webb

READ THE REST AT: http://www.consortiumnews.com/2008/120908.html

We All Failed Gary Webb

By Robert Parry
December 10, 2008 (A Special Report)

Since Gary Webb’s suicide four years ago, I have written annual retrospectives about the late journalist’s important contribution to the historical record -- he forced devastating admissions from the CIA about drug trafficking by the Nicaraguan contra rebels under the protection of the Reagan administration in the 1980s.

And each time I’ve written one of those stories, I have received e-mails attacking my acceptance of the fact that Webb committed suicide on the night of Dec. 9, 2004. Some people want to believe that he was really assassinated by the CIA or some other government agency.

But the evidence of his carefully planned suicide – as he suffered deep pain as a pariah in his profession who could no longer earn a living – actually points to something possibly even more tragic: Webb ended his life because people who should have supported his work simply couldn’t be bothered.

Though Gary Webb was horribly betrayed by his colleagues in the news business – and especially his editors at the San Jose Mercury News – he also was taken advantage of by people in the progressive movement, who sometimes exploited his celebrity by having him speak at their events for little or no money.

There is a deeply troubling attitude within the American progressive movement that it bears next to no responsibility for people who speak truth to power and suffer horrible consequences, as Webb did. While sometimes progressives cheer the heroism, they rarely back it up with anything sustainable.

More often than not, after the celebrity fades, the person is left to fend for him or herself as an outcast from a profession that pays a salary and lets a person support a family. Indeed, what happened to Gary Webb – and to other mainstream journalists who took chances in the name of truth – is a powerful object lesson to those left behind, to play it safe.

Progressives often denounce mainstream journalists as sell-outs who are too timid to challenge the powerful or to take on the tough stories. But – by refusing to invest significantly in a media infrastructure – the progressives are partly responsible for the problem.

I must take some of the blame for Webb’s death, too.

When I broke with mainstream journalism in the 1990s – because I wouldn’t accept cover stories about Iran-Contra and related scandals – I started Consortiumnews.com with the idea of providing a home both for honest news and for honest journalists.

I thought it would be relatively easy to persuade enough people of means that this enterprise was worth the investment, but I failed. Because of that failure, I was forced to make Consortiumnews.com a part-time operation in 2000 and went to work as an editor at Bloomberg News, so I could pay off bills I’d accumulated.

When I decided to quit Bloomberg in spring 2004 and resume Consortiumnews.com on a full-time basis, one of my hopes was that the consequences of George W. Bush’s disastrous presidency finally would have convinced people about the need for effective independent journalism.

And I thought that once I had raised enough money, I could reach out to Gary Webb and offer him some meaningful work. However, to my dismay, I again encountered resistance from funding sources and had to delay those plans once more.

As it turned out, I waited too long.

READ THE REST AT: http://www.consortiumnews.com/2008/120908.html